As spotted by WorldbyStorm. For copyright reasons I’ll not reproduce it here, but Met Éireann have a stunning image of the snowfall across the UK & Ireland taken at 13.09 on 22 December from the NERC Satellite Receiving Station, Dundee University, Scotland. And if you take a look at their gallery, you’ll see things haven’t changed much since then… Pete Baker
Using a clip from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which NASAtelevision has online, here’s a short seasonal treat from JPLnews. Accelerating about 17 minutes of sunset on Nov. 4 and 5, 2010, into a 30 second simulation it’s the longest sunset movie from Mars ever produced. There’s also a clip of Phobos partially eclipsing the Sun, if you follow the links… Nasa press release here. Pete Baker
Update: RTE will have a link here to Newgrange tomorrow morning (before 8.56 am) after checking out the lunar eclipse. Each year a small media circus decamps for a brief moment at the winter solstice to Newgrange in County Meath. The following is a seasonal offering to anyone who wants a bit more background than is usually offered (although obviously reading the likes of Geraldine and Matt Stout’s Newgrange also helps). The mound at Newgrange has a complex history, with the famous roof box that allows …
Ever eager to take a share of wider fame, the Derry heritage industry will be as keen as anyone to learn the verdict of the tests on a sliver of bone found off Kiribati. Her story shows that Derry did not quite enjoy a monopoly of the famous American aviator but if the riddle of her disappearance is finally solved, it should give a boost to the little local museum, currently closed. Brian WalkerFormer BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester …
As expected, the European Court of Human Rights has just ruled against the Irish State’s refusal to enact an abortion law. The ruling is precise and appears to dismiss the Irish government’s case in detail, adding that the State has failed to uphold a woman’s constituional rights. RTE reports that : the ECHR concluded Ireland had breached the woman’s right to respect for her private life given the failure to implement the existing Constitutional right to a lawful abortion in Ireland. The …
With the BBC noting a somewhat speculative report on a newly discovered exoplanet, Wasp 12b, here’s a short informative video from ESA Euronews on the ongoing search for planets beyond our solar system. And here are some previous posts on the topic. Pete Baker
This is a cross post from Miljenko Williams who blogs at 21st Century Fix. It was originally posted on the Political Innovation site here. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a regular lurker around the blogosphere and the longer, cleverer articles on media websites. You may even go further than that and comment occasionally, “Digg”, share or “like” postings on Facebook. And if you’re very clever with your RSS reader, you may have found a way of getting some of …
When Nasa called a press conference “to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life” there was “snowballing speculation” about what they might have found, and calls to Nasa from the White House and Congress. The Science journal’s embargo didn’t help – paper abstract here. What they’ve found is a bacterium in California’s Mono Lake that, apparently, can use arsenic instead of phosphorus in its DNA. As the Nasa Astrobiology website notes Up until now, it …
On Wednesday 28th November 1660 twelve men met at Gresham College in London following a lecture there, and constituted themselves into an association “for the promoting of Experimentall Philosophy”. Among them was “Mr Boyle”, likely Robert Boyle, son of the first Earl of Cork, born at Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford, on 25 January 1627, and employer, co-experimenter and friend of Robert Hooke. The Royal Society was born – although the first Royal Charter for the Society was not granted until 1662, with a …
A bunch of hacks (programmers) and hackers (journalists – real and citizen!) attended ScraperWiki‘s workshop in the University of Ulster Belfast campus on Saturday. The idea was to unearth benefit and stories from the public data, if necessary using robotic data scraping techniques to lift facts and figures out of ill-formatted webpages into a more useful database format to explore the connections. Three teams formed, looking at NI Court decisions, comparing pay levels across public, private and voluntary vacancies advertised …
Fascinating discovery by Nasa’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which achieved first light in August 2008. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. From the Nasa press release NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy. “What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and …
As the BBC noted, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern has switched from firing beams of protons to beams of heavy [lead] ions. From the BBC report One of the scientists who will be taking a part in the experiment is David Evans from the University of Birmingham, UK. “Although the tiny fireballs will only exist for a fleeting moment (less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) the temperatures will reach over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than …
Here’s a wondrous short video of the recent flyby of Comet Hartley 2 by the Nasa/JPL EPOXI Mission using 40 images taken from Deep Impact’s Medium-Resolution Instrument during the encounter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD/Brown University. And the EPOXI Mission scientists present their preliminary findings at a press conference. Video via NASAtelevision. Pete Baker
I caught up with SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie on this morning just after she had finished rehearsing her leaders speech in the empty hall. 1.30pm Having escaped from the conference to the side of a humid swimming pool, I reflect that the Ramada Hotel wasn’t anywhere near as well attended as their February conference in Newcastle. It does seem strange that with the election in May, the SDLP didn’t just postpone again until February and use the conference as a …
As I mentioned last month, Nasa’s Deep Impact probe was redirected towards comet 103P/Hartley at the start of 2008 as part of the EPOXI mission – see post from the time. The image top was taken by the EPOXI mission on Nov. 2, 2010 from a distance of 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles). [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD] And, as the BBC report notes, Deep Impact should be flying within 700km of the comet just about now [1402 GMT]. Live coverage on Nasa TV. …
As the BBC noted, astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope [VLT] have confirmed that galaxy UDFy-38135539, one of several candidates identified in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) image of the Fornax Constellation acquired with the telescope’s new Wide Field Camera 3 last year, is the most distant galaxy ever detected. [Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and University of California, Santa Cruz) and the HUDF09 Team] Spectroscopic analysis of data collected during a 16 hour observation using the VLT identified a red shift …
Mick is unable to give the coverage this deserves; discuss, add links, comments etc on the ‘Coalition’ review of finances below. Blank
When the comet-like asteroid P/2010 A2 was identified as a suspected asteroid-asteroid collision in January this year it was the first such collision caught “in the act”. Images Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA). As the BBC notes, subsequent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Rosetta probe suggest that the collision probably occurred in early 2009. Here’s a sequence of Hubble observations from January to May 2010, with scale. As the associated text explains The asteroid debris, dubbed P/2010 A2, appears to be …
This is a cross-post by William Heath – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here. If the big political innovation of the moment is to give power back to people, then a good place to do it is with personal data. Whose data is it anyway? Whose health, whose education, whose identity, whose shopping history, bank details, travel plans, creditworthiness? Yet all these personal details, which affect us, are stored on hundreds of state and private-sector databases. If I …
The ‘Skeptics in the Pub’ idea is a one that has been spreading globally in for a while with a growing number of regular local events including plenty in England and a well established Dublin group. A branch has now been established in Belfast and the inaugural meeting will be at the Duke of York next Tuesday (12th) at 7pm. While it’s key aim is to provide an organising hub for Rationalists and Secularists, in the case of the Westminster …
